Interview with Nischal Shetty, co-founder of GrabInbox Special

GrabInbox is an application that allows users to manage multiple accounts on several social networks. Today, I am pleased to interview Nischal Shetty, one of its founders.

Cendrine Marrouat: Hello Nischal, thank you for answering my questions. As a starter, tell us a little bit about you.

Nischal Shetty: Hi Cendrine, thank you for the interview. I’m a software engineer with over 4 years of experience building web products. I believe in building applications for consumers that are fast and easy to use. I quit my job around 9 months ago in order to work full time on our products.

CM: GrabInbox is the result of your collaboration with Sameer Mhatre. How did you meet and what gave you the idea of creating GrabInbox?

NS: We used to work together at an Indian startup called burrp.com, which offers reviews and ratings of various restaurants in major Indian cities. The idea of GrabInbox came about through our own need for an easy way to manage multiple networks that we each had. The existing apps out there did not quite fit our needs.

CM: What makes GrabInbox different from platforms like Hootsuite and TweetDeck?

NS: Most of the existing applications including HootSuite and TweeDeck expect users to create columns for each network they intend to manage. It’s the same as asking a user to create new tabs in their browser, and if you have a lot of social networks to manage the columns, just add up. We thought we should do away with columns. The ‘Notifications’ feature that we now have on GrabInbox is a result of this desire to make away with columns.

We’re the first to take this approach of Notifications for any of the social networks you add. Notifications help users not miss any of the important updates. We also have JustLater, a feature that uses smart algorithms to calculate the best time to post your updates and automatically schedules posts at the right time.

CM: GrabInbox is currently limited to three social networks: Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. Any plans to include Google+? What other upgrades are in the works?

NS: We are all geared up for Google+. Google has yet to release the API to everyone and as soon as they do that we will have it on GrabInbox. Apart from that, we intend to get Team support so that multiple users can manage the same set of accounts. We’re also working on integrating Twitter search.

CM: Your products (GrabInbox and JustUnfollow) are used by 450,000 people in the world. What do you believe are the reasons for your success?

NS: We believe in building products that are easy to use. We also offer excellent customer service. We make sure we’re always available to our users and promptly reply to their queries. This has led to users helping us spread the word about our products. We see a lot of traffic from user recommendation.

To give you an idea, justunfollow.com has been tweeted more than 150,000 times on Twitter. We hope we get the same love for GrabInbox as well.

CM: How have you used social media to create a buzz about GrabInbox?

NS: We’re still working on this one. We will introduce some easy sharing features so that users can tweet about us if they like our product.

CM: You are currently part of Start-Up Chile, a program of the Chilean Government to attract world-class early stage entrepreneurs to start their businesses in Chile. Would you tell us a little more about it?

NS:Start-Up Chile is an excellent program for start-ups. The program provides entrepreneurs with US$40K of funding, which is equity-free and an opportunity to live and work on your start-up in Chile. And it’s open to anyone from any part of the world.

Chile is a beautiful country and we couldn’t have asked for a better way to start our entrepreneurial journey. Apart from the equity, the folks behind the program make sure they do everything possible to help you in building a successful start-up. I also like the fact that we met entrepreneurs from around the world thanks to this program.

CM: What is next for you?

NS: We are just getting started. In the next few months we plan to launch more features, integrate many more networks and develop mobile apps for GrabInbox.

NS: I just want to say that we’re working hard on making a really great product to help everyone easily manage all their social networks like Twitter, Facebook etc. We’re open to feedback and are actively working on integrating new features all the time.

Thank you so much for this opportunity to connect with your readers Cendrine!